Tag: Sacramento

When you visit a new area, do you use Yelp or other applications to find restaurants to visit? Yelp gives the High Hand Conservatory (website link) in Loomis, CA four stars, and TripAdvisor gives it four and a half stars. Traveling and Blogging Near and Far gives it five stars.

To get to the spacious, moderately-priced cafe, you’ll weave your way through a beautiful nursery wonderland. We arrived at a good time, about 8:00 on a Saturday, after the early birds but before the late risers. Timing is everything. The food and service were so fabulous that I forgot to take pictures and enjoyed my meal. You can check out their menu on The TripAdvisor website.

As much as I love food, the atmosphere made the experience unique. We ate in the covered courtyard, open to the garden vistas and could hardly wait to tour the outdoor and enclosed nurseries as well as the shops housed within the long metal building called a Fruit Shed.

Have you ever bought a grocery-store succulent and two weeks later it turned yellow and the leaves withered and fell off? I’ve done this. Neither spritzing nor ignoring it seemed to halt the dropping leaves. If you enjoy succulents, you could pick out small ones and plant them yourselves at one of the outdoor stations.

You could find more than unique gifts here. Classes for arts and crafts fill up quickly. We walked into one class, and several participants allowed us to photograph their gourd projects.

For my quilting and knitting friends, one of the stores had plenty of “yard goods,” as my grandma used to call fabric. Loomis, CA would be a great place to schedule a retreat and come for classes or just to sew together.

If you watch American Pickers, the cost of junkyard cars and parts seems out of range for the average buyer, but nothing draws attention in a professional garden or nursery like a great old car. The cars in this nursery did not have a price tag. To complete your home gardens, you could find fun garden art at High Hand. I loved the lasered shovel. Ideas are free.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this brief tour of High Hand. Pictures don’t do it justice. It’s only about a twenty-minute drive north from Sacramento to the small town of Loomis, CA. The two hours my family and I spent at High Hand went too quickly. I’m ready to go back. Want to join me?

Featured Puzzle

If you are interested in having one of these pictures as a puzzle, check out my puzzle website. If you have a picture from your travels you’d like to turn into a puzzle, you can make it yourself or send it to me, and I’ll set it up for you.

A container holds something. A car holds people. Therefore a car is a container.

Smile, it was supposed to be funny. 🙂

Actually, the museum building is also a container. It contained mock buildings, which contained relics.

Container is a noun. Contain is a verb. Vince and his son could hardly contain their excitement when we went to the California Auto Museum in Sacramento. Uncontained excitement, like uncontained anything spills out and gets all over.

Have you ever seen such intensity? I couldn’t contain myself from taking this picture.

Their excitement spilled all over me, and I loved the museum, too. My pick for today’s visit – a classic Woody. This container even contains a container in the back.

Yes, I did. I came in 98.45% of over 2,000,000 go-cart racers in speed!!! I have the paperwork to prove it!!! OK J was 99.96%. Here’s the big difference. He came in #1 in our heat, and I came in ……

Here’s a few shots from the sidelines of the track. J raced three times. He’s wearing brown pants, and was #1 all three times. He even got better each time.

The flags were very important. Most people know that the white flag is the last lap, and the checkered flag means the race is over. I got the blue flag a lot. That meant someone was in back of me wanting to get around me. “Move over to the right, Slow Poke!!!” So, like the polite driver I am, I did. I guess everyone passed me. Only one person bumped me, but V got bumped and spun around. I sure don’t know how HE beat me!!!

The dress code was a little strange. I expected a helmet, but not a sock cap that went over everything but your eyes and nose. I accidentally threw mine away at the end, but the guys were really nice. You can see it sticking out below the helmet on this guy.

Sitting in these low go carts wasn’t as bad as it looks for an old person like me. I was glad V was along, or I would have been the only old person there in that heat! I was the only woman. You drive it a little differently than a car. The right foot pedal is go and the left is brake. The cars have governors on them, so the race way guys stop your car sometimes, or makes it go very slowly. Then, all of the sudden, you just take off, full speed. NO control!!!

Dad gave it up after one race even though he paid for three times. He watched PROUDLY as his son won every race. V was really glad I raced. He was #9. There were 10 racers.

If you haven’t guessed already, V’s Son, J, will soon turn 43. Of course, I’m WAY too young smart to have had a son THAT old!! My pride is the only thing that keeps J as a step-son rather than granting him full sonship. I bore him when HE was 25. OUCH!!!

So….I have a racing card now. I’m registered in the system. So how about you? Want to go with us next time?

Six on Sunday was my least popular post. Hard to mess with Ten on Tuesday. Maybe 16 on Sunday might sell better, or maybe the holy number 7. Can I find seven holy things today? Pardon me if I bend the word a little, but I’ll give it a shot. Tell me if I succeeded.

1. “Holy cow, that is an expensive car,” both my husband and step-son explained in hushed, I wish I could win the lottery tones.

“The Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren was an expensive supercar that boasted a top speed in excess of 200 mph and could sprint from zero to 60 mph in under 4 seconds. Unless you were a CEO or media mogul, the SLR was unlikely to show up on your shopping list, as a new one cost around a half-million dollars. It’s equally unlikely that you’ll ever even see one, since overall sales numbers for the North American market were only in the hundreds before the car was discontinued in 2009.”

2. Native American stories handed down over generations venerate the wolf as a holy animal. Today people still love the lone wolf and honor it in a different way.

3. Holy matrimony requires attending an occasional car show on Sunday even. One must pay proper reverence to the cars that make the most noise and go the fastest. There were some other breeds at the Corvette show in Sacramento. This was his pick of this litter.

4. Wikipedia is becoming accepted even in some academic circles if it has sources and it vetted. According to this controversial source, “The English word “holy” dates back to at least the 11th Century with the Old English word hālig, an adjective derived from hāl meaning “whole” and used to mean “uninjured, sound, healthy, entire, complete”. The Scottish hale (“health, happiness and wholeness”) is the most complete modern form of this Old English root. The modern word “health” is also derived from the Old English hal.”

By the end of the show my normally somber-looking husband had a healthy and holy smile on his face.

5. Gold and silver often denote power, riches, or prestige. As it is written, at his birth the holyChrist-child received gold and other valuable gifts from the kings that came from afar to pay him homage. Had he been born in the 1970s, he might have received one of these.

6. Do you have a holy curiosity? Not the kind that kills cats, but weren’t you wondering what the back half of the longer vehicle was? I had never seen one. Imagine cruising down Interstate 5 in 1972 next to this Cadillac motor home. Who might have been driving it?

7. Historically water has had holy purposes in many religions. It functions to cleanse the body of both evil and dirt, and prepare one for sacred service. Air, on the other hand, has been taken for granted. Dirty air is an unholy, unhealthy mess. In the early 1900s, 1912-1917 to be exact, GM sold electric trucks. They never caught on. In 1997, GM tried again to introduce a vehicle that would help keep the air clean. The EV1, produced in 1996, was leased only. When the leases expired, GM thought they destroyed all the EV1s. This One got away.

The rest were reincarnated as Nissan Leafs, which should be leaves, but isn’t. Now isn’t that reVolting?

The boys and I all had a great time in Sacramento, both at the Corvette show honoring the veterans, and at the California Auto Museum. Hats off to the California Auto Museum which allowed veterans free admission today. We all recommend this museum if you enjoy history, cars, trucks, famous people, or something to do on a Sunday afternoon.